Canada -- Description and travel; United States -- Description and travel
Montauk. It is a long coast, fringed with lights to point the
mariner's way into New York harbor.
They tell us that when the "Onrest" came into the Sound there were
thirteen tribes of Indians on Long Island, and that it was the mint
for the aborigines, these tribes being the great makers of wampum, the
Indian money, for which its beaches and bays furnished the materials.
The Montauks, on the eastern end, were the most formidable, and were
usually carrying on wars with the Pequots, across the Sound in New
England. Out on Shinnecock Neck is the reservation where live the
small remnant of the Shinnecock tribe, there being barely a hundred of
them, each family in a little house on a little farm it tills. Around
Jamaica Bay once lived the Jameko tribe, all now disappeared. At
quaintly named Quogue, Daniel Webster used to go fishing and bathing.
The hill tops of the Hamptons have perched upon them the picturesque
old Dutch windmills which are so attractive to the artists, and at
East Hampton still stands the venerable gabled house where lived Lyman
Beecher in his earlier ministry, and where his elder children,
Catharine and Edward Beecher, were born. Here also passed his boyhood,
before he began wandering over the earth, the author of _Home, Sweet
Home_, John Howard Payne, his father being the village schoolmaster.
Payne's quaint little shingled cottage is East Hampton's most sacred
memorial. The inhabitants of East Hampton are so much in love with
their healthy home, which dates from 1648, that on its two hundred and
fiftieth anniversary, celebrated in 1898, the announcement was made
that they "like East Hampton in a thick fog better than any other
place in full sunshine." Eastward from Jamaica, in the western centre
of Long Island, are Creedmoor, the noted rifle range, Hempstead, where
the New York troops were mobilized in 1898 for the Spanish War, and
Garden City, the model suburban town laid out by Alexander T. Stewart,
containing a handsome Episcopal Cathedral. Not far away is Hicksville,
and to the northward the ancient town of Jericho. This was a tract
bought from the Indians by Robert, the brother of Roger Williams, in
1650, which afterwards became a place of Quaker settlement, and here
lived and preached for sixty years the famous Elias Hicks, the founder
of one of the Quaker sects. He was an opponent of war and of slavery,
and rode all over the country as a missionary preacher.
THE NORTHERN LONG ISLAND SHORE.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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